Written By: Ben Cosgrove
Guadalcanal. Iwo Jima. Okinawa. Bougainville. Saipan. These names, and the names of other battles and campaigns from the Pacific Theater during World War II, serve as a kind of brutal shorthand for scenes of unspeakable carnage and, at times, unfathomable courage.
But for reasons lost to the decades, countless other pivotal battles in the Pacific have been largely forgotten by most of the world even as they’re remembered and commemorated by the dwindling number of those still alive who fought in them, and by those who lost husbands, brothers, fathers and friends to the war. The long, long, three-and-half-year New Guinea Campaign, for example, saw scores of battles as bloody and as strategically vital as any others fought during WWII, but the names and places of many of those battles and the places strike no chord with the general public.
Here, LIFE.com recalls one of those pivotal battles, the Battle of Buna-Gona, through pictures made by the master photojournalist George Strock including one of the most famous and influential photographs ever taken in any war, anywhere: the disquieting image of three dead Americans half-buried in the sand at a place called Buna Beach.
What is ultimately so notable about Strock’s picture, however beyond its sheer technical excellence, and its quiet power is that when it was published in LIFE magazine in September 1943, it was the first time that any photograph depicting dead American troops had appeared in any American publication during World War II. The story behind how the photograph came to be published, meanwhile, speaks volumes about LIFE magazine’s national stature during the war, and the strained relationship that always exists (and, in an elemental way, should always exist) between journalists and government officials.
The short version of the story goes like this:
For months after Strock made his now-iconic picture, LIFE’s editors pushed the American government’s military censors to allow the magazine to publish that one photograph. The concern, among some at LIFE and certainly many in the government, was that Americans were growing complacent about a war that was far from over and in which an Allied victory was far from certain. A 25-year-old LIFE correspondent in Washington named Cal Whipple refused to take no for an answer from the censors and as he put it in a memoir written for his family years later he “went from Army captain to major to colonel to general, until I wound up in the office of an assistant secretary of the Air Corps, who decided, ‘This has to go to the White House.'”
In the Sept. 20, 1943, issue of LIFE, in which Strock’s photo first appeared (and in which it was given a full page to itself), the magazine’s editors made the case to LIFE’s readers for publishing the picture even if it took the better part of a year to bring the censors and President Franklin Roosevelt himself around to their way of thinking:
Here lie three Americans [the editorial began].
What shall we say of them? Shall we say that this is a noble sight? Shall we say that this is a fine thing, that they should give their lives for their country?
Or shall we say that this is too horrible to look at?
Why print this picture, anyway, of three American boys dead upon an alien shore? Is it to hurt people? To be morbid?
Those are not the reasons.
The reason is that words are never enough. The eye sees. The mind knows. The heart feels. But the words do not exist to make us see, or know, or feel what it is like, what actually happens. The words are never right. . . .
The reason we print it now is that, last week, President Roosevelt and [Director of the Office of War Information] Elmer Davis and the War Department decided that the American people ought to be able to see their own boys as they fall in battle; to come directly and without words into the presence of their own dead.
And so here it is. This is the reality that lies behind the names that come to rest at last on monuments in the leafy squares of busy American towns.
There is much, much more in the editorial, including a great deal of soaring rhetoric about America as a symbol of freedom; a paean to an archetypal “stout, gray-haired woman” baking apple pie; and always, the image of “our boys, born of our women, reared in our schools, bred to our horizons. . . . “
Much of the language feels at-once stirring and oddly stilted today. But the editorial’s earnestness, and the conviction evident in every line of having done the right thing in publishing Strock’s picture, reminds us that 70 years ago, men and women still believed that a single photograph could make a difference. And who’s to say, in the end, that Strock’s photograph, and LIFE’s insistence on publishing it, didn’t do exactly that?
Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
“Three dead Americans on the beach at Buna.”
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
American troops, Buna, New Guinea Campaign, World War II.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
“An American soldier stands over a dying Jap whom he has just been forced to shoot. The Jap had been hiding in the landing barge, shooting at U.S. troops.” New Guinea Campaign, 1942.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Photos (with handwritten notes) by George Strock from the New Guinea Campaign.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures
“A wounded Jap lies in a destroyed pillbox at Buna Mission. A minute later, he rose up, tried to throw a grenade which he had hidden in his left hand.” (Note: The Japanese soldier was shot dead by an American officer who was standing behind Strock.)
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Japanese booby trap found during the campaign to oust enemy forces from the area.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Photos (with handwritten notes) by George Strock from the New Guinea Campaign.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures
“Over Jap-built bridge walk Americans on patrol. It connects Entrance Creek Island with Buna Mission and one end of it was blown by Japs. Americans repaired it.”
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
“Lieut. General Robert Eichelberger fires a tommy gun at the Japs.”
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
“At a medical collecting station Gen. Eichelberger stops for tea. Soon he was on his way again, walking toward the Buna front through mud to his knees.”
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Photos (with handwritten notes) by George Strock from the New Guinea Campaign.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures
“The general [Eichelberger] gives cigarets to a dripping soldier taking a bath in a swamp creek. These cigarets were his own personal issue. In the beginning of the campaign they were especially scarce.”
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
!["The general [Eichelberger] gives cigarets to a dripping soldier taking a bath in a swamp creek. These cigarets were his own personal issue. In the beginning of the campaign they were especially scarce."](https://qa-static.life.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated/2014/10/wwii-buna-beach-george-strock-12-823x1024.jpg "\"The general [Eichelberger] gives cigarets to a dripping soldier taking a bath in a swamp creek. These cigarets were his own personal issue. In the beginning of the campaign they were especially scarce.\"")
American Captain Byron E. Bradford in a trench during the fight against Japanese forces, Buna, New Guinea Campaign.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
“In a captured Jap intercommunication trench, soldiers rest and clean their guns. Sniping is going on right above them.”
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
“Jap 6.5-MM. light machine guns (.25 cal.) are displayed. The key weapons in Jap infantry attacks, they weigh 22 lb., fire 550 rounds a minute.”
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
“A few hundred yards behind the lines U.S. soldiers flop in exhaustion, trying to sleep and dry their clothes as best they can.”
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
A U.S. soldier uses his helmet to draw Japanese sniper fire, Buna, WWII.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Photos (with handwritten notes) by George Strock from the New Guinea Campaign.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures
“On Bottcher’s Corner men dig into foxholes to support machine-gun positions directly ahead of them. From the end of the corridor carved out by Bottcher’s men between Buna Village and Buna Mission. A minute later one of these men was wounded.”
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Buna, New Guinea Campaign, WWII.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Photos (with handwritten notes) by George Strock from the New Guinea Campaign.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures
A soldier with fever is aided by fellow soldiers, Buna, New Guinea Campaign, WWII.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Dead Japanese soldiers, Buna, New Guinea Campaign, WWII.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Photos (with handwritten notes) by George Strock from the New Guinea Campaign.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures
Typing at an improvised table, Buna, New Guinea Campaign, WWII.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Wounded U.S. troops, Buna, New Guinea Campaign, WWII.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Buna, New Guinea Campaign, WWII.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Buna, New Guinea Campaign, WWII.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Treating the wounded, Buna, New Guinea Campaign, WWII.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Photos (with handwritten notes) by George Strock from the New Guinea Campaign.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures
“At church service soldiers who have just captured Buna Village look straight ahead or bow their heads in prayer. Said Captain Boice, their commander: ‘This is not the first time Americans have carried guns to church and it will not be the last.’ Later Captain Boice was killed.”
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
“A line of crude crosses marks American graves near Buna. A grave registrar’s glove accidentally points toward the sky.”
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Japanese dead in the surf, Buna, New Guinea Campaign, WWII. The photo ran with the headline: “This is ‘Maggot Beach.'”
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Alternate view of beach seen in famous George Strock photo, Buna, New Guinea Campaign, WWII.
George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
